Today we are launching a new series on GEAR:30 called, “Reviewing the Reviewer,” and the idea here is pretty simple: we’ll be asking various Blister reviewers questions about their backgrounds and gear preferences, to give you a more complete picture of the people behind our reviews.

And since we like to rank & review things around here, we will be scoring each of our reviewers’ answers to come up with a review grade for each of them. That last part — rating our reviewers — was actually Luke Koppa’s idea, though when he came up with that, he had no idea that we were going to make him go first. So that kinda feels like poetic justice.

I sat down with Luke in Blister HQ and asked him about where he grew up and what he was into as a kid; his gear preferences and what gear he is most picky about and least picky about and why; then we had number of guest questions from ON3P Skis founder, Scott Andrus; and, among other things, I asked Luke who his favorite BLISTER reviewer is; and I actually got him to rank his siblings from most favorite to least favorite, before wrapping up with some questions about Luke’s favorite books, music, and movies.

One caveat: we do at the end of the episode tally up the scores of Luke’s answers, and then assign a grade. But if any of you happen to be exceptionally “Type A,” you might want to follow along and check our scoring, because there’s a very good chance that I might have messed something up here. So feel free to check my math.

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Luke Koppa showing off his signature trick in Crested Butte, CO. (For reference, his cranky face is due to the fact that he had just chickened out of a backflip and was very disappointed in himself.)